Asbestos Safety Mandate
Category: Regulation || Area of Effect: Safety || Proposed by: The Wallenburgian World Assembly Offices
Recognizing the exceptional characteristics of asbestos fibers and its utility in many industrial applications,
Also recognizing the severe health ramifications to the inhabitants of many member states of prolonged exposure to high concentrations of airborne asbestos,
Encouraging member states to reduce any non-essential asbestos use and replace asbestos-reinforced materials with safer alternatives wherever possible,
The World Assembly hereby enacts these mandates:
- All buildings containing asbestos or likely to contain asbestos must be inspected for asbestos content and exposure risks to any current or future occupants. Each such building must be inspected for asbestos exposure again periodically, no later than five (5) years after its most recent inspection. Inspectors must be qualified and equipped to locate and detect asbestos in a manner that does not expose occupants to harmful concentrations of asbestos. Member states must maintain records of asbestos exposure resulting from these inspections and must make these records available to current or prospective building occupants upon request.
- Member states or their relevant subnational entities must condemn buildings which expose occupants to harmful concentrations of asbestos or present a significant risk within the next five (5) years of exposing any occupants to harmful concentrations of asbestos.
- Such buildings may not be occupied in any manner which exposes individuals to harmful concentrations of asbestos, except as is strictly necessary to the removal of asbestos from the building or the demolition or deconstruction of the building or to the immediate health and safety of the public.
- Food, medicine, clothing, and other goods meant to be in regular contact with or taken into the body may not be stored in any manner reasonably foreseeable to result in contamination with harmful concentrations of asbestos.
- A Biohazard Control Office is established. It provides administrative assistance in carrying out asbestos inspections, at the request of member states. The Biohazard Control Office also receives reports from building occupants or representative entities on possible asbestos exposure, evaluates the merits of these reports, and conducts investigations on the basis of these reports as it deems responsible. Member states or their relevant subnational entities must surrender to the Biohazard Control Office information necessary to complete investigations.
- If the Biohazard Control Office concludes from its investigation that an inspection was insufficient or likely does not accurately represent the current asbestos exposure risk of a building, the building must be inspected again within two (2) months.
- The Biohazard Control Office reports possible violations of member obligations to the World Assembly Compliance Commission.
- In all future construction or manufacture of construction components, asbestos may only be used as an ingredient where its use presents no measurable long-term health or safety risk, or where its use is essential to the successful completion of a structure.